We present a study of the university post-enrolment timetabling problem, proposed as Track 2 of the 2007 International Timetabling Competition. We approach the problem using several techniques, particularly local search, constraint programming techniques and hybrids of these in the form of a large neighbourhood search scheme. Our local search approach won the competition. Our best constraint pr...

The students of the Industrial Design department at the TU Eindhoven are allowed to design part of their curriculum by selecting courses from a huge course pool. They do this by handing in ordered preference lists with their favorite courses for the forthcoming time period. Based on these informations (and on many other constraints), the department then assigns courses to students. Until recent...

Over-constrained systems are unsolvable by traditional methods with respect to the existing contradictory constraints in a problem definition. Solutions of such systems are defined and computed by giving some preferences or weights to the individual constraints and minimizing the violations of constraints using these preferences. The complexity and size of solved problem is often very large and...

In this study, the University Course Timetabling Problem (UCTP) has been investigated. This is a form of Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) and belongs to the NP-complete class. The nature of a such problem is highly descriptive, a solution therefore involves combining many aspects of the problem. Although various timetabling algorithms have been continuously developed for nearly half a cent...

In this paper we present a general integer programming-based approach for the minimal perturbation problem (MPP) in university course timetabling. This problem arises when an existing timetable contains hard constraint violations, or infeasibilities, which need to be resolved. The objective is to resolve these infeasibilities while minimising the disruption or perturbation to the remainder of t...